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The Resistance Will Be Merchandised

The popular movement against Donald Trump has inspired crowds of protesters, pithy slogans, and endless memes. For opportunists looking to make a quick buck, it’s a great time to be American.

RESISTANCE, PREJUDICE, STAND FOR YOURSELF. Under the Trump presidency, you might expect to see such empowered liberal vocabulary on a protest sign or following a hashtag, but one place you don’t is in the middle of the Port Authority subway station’s mildewed underground mall, where tourists buy NYC kitsch and desperate husbands pick up dusty bouquets on their commute home. In the glass storefront of the boutique R.A.G. New York, a dose of The Resistance can be found splashed across a bright red sweatshirt, jet-black fishtail hoodie, and shiny white bomber jacket. In 2017, politics has spread even here, and the message is on sale for just $16.99.

The budget resistance-wear is from a New Jersey brand named Krome, and the line is called Anarchy. It’s a curious label for clothing that takes a seemingly progressive stance in its sloganeering, combining gaudy Banksy-lite graffiti and RESISTOR armbands into woke outerwear. Like a good protest sign, the Krome clothing is both radical and cheap—a combination that’s paying off. “Our brick-and-mortars sold them very well,” says Lisa Alves, who, alongside her husband, runs R.A.G.’s two stores underneath 41st and 42nd Streets, as well as its bustling website.

According to the clothing’s creator, the seemingly anti-Trump invective is more of a marketing gimmick. “A lot of kids are upset with the system, the way the system is working,” says Max Bhavnani, the 42-year-old founder of Mischief International, Krome’s parent company. “We’re not saying that the system is right or wrong. We are just trying to be fashion, not trying to be political. Once you get political in your designs, then you have a 50-50 clientele. That’s not good. It’s always good to be neutral.” It’s a Trump-era echo of Michael Jordan’s alleged “Even Republicans buy sneakers” excuse for keeping partisanship out of retail.

Liberal politics is only the latest trend that the Queens-born Bhavnani has capitalized on. He worked in the fast-fashion industry for eighteen years before striking out on his own in 2012 by launching Mischief International. (The name was inspired by his father, who founded a business called Mischief Sportswear before passing away when Bhavnani was 18.) Krome might be Mischief’s flagship brand, but as with the Anarchy line, its business is in discount imitation. Krome knocks off sneaker culture, working the wavy ankle shape of the original Nike Yeezys into a hood on a sweatshirt, or putting the mesh texture from Adidas NMD runners onto a T-shirt. The designs are manufactured in Shanghai, and the products go on sale in more than 600 stores, as well as on websites like DrJays.com, according to Bhavnani.

In 2015, he hired a 35-year-old Korean designer and Parsons graduate named Chris Hwang to give Krome a new look. Bhavnani says he was struck by the social and political tumult going on at the time: The Baltimore riots following the murder of Freddie Gray, protests after the mass shooting at a church in South Carolina, and the terrorist attacks in Paris. “All this inspiration came with all the hatred and racism against African-Americans,” Bhavnani says. “That’s what Anarchy came from, just being against the system.”

Hwang was brought in on the gambit to make fast-fashion wokeness. The word “RESISTANCE” was meant to “represent the spirit of the time,” Hwang says. “The government was very unstable and there were a lot of demonstrations in the U.S., so I wanted to express the situation through the collection.” Hwang left it at that, declining to explain his personal perspective further.

Attempting to profit from politics while posing as apolitical has been a popular strategy of late. Versace prominently featured words like “UNIFIED” and “LOYALTY” in a February runway show while failing to clarify what the brand actually meant by them. Designer Demna Gvasalia hijacked Bernie Sanders’ logo for his Fall-Winter 2017 show. Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad might have marked the peak of woke-washing, but then Heineken surfed that backlash with its own milquetoast come-together commercial. Even the satirical Dog Rates Twitter account has taken to selling shirts that say “h*ck the system,” except the "e" is a paw print. Buy one for every dog-loving anarchist in your life.

All of these insta-products made to go viral are hard to take, even if some are created with donation programs and sincere politics in mind. But Bhavnani’s appropriation of protest iconography, despite a commercial interest in remaining neutral, seems to take activism-jacking to another level. It takes guts to maintain a “gotta hear both sides” stance when your company is screen-printing shirts with images of SWAT teams clearly inspired by the riots in Baltimore. Krome reduces ideological conflict to Internet-meme status, then sells it at half off. In a subway basement.

The artistry of the ripoff is almost admirable in its shameless erasure of any identifiable source. Krome also released a sweater emblazoned with the phrase “FCK the system,” featuring a two-inch drop shoulder that “almost feels like a shawl,” Bhavnani says. It was copied from a progressive Japanese label. Pressed further, the founder admits he found it on Instagram and doesn’t remember the exact source. “We also made a T-shirt that said ‘Peace’ with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Gandhi in a frame,” Bhavnani says. “But we never dropped it.” It wasn’t that the imagery was excessive or under copyright; they just had too many designs and saved it for a future season.

That unthinking pileup of famous faces with their collective politics boiled down to one word underlines the absurdity of Bhavnani’s enterprise. Krome’s Anarchy line is as empty as a prop can of Pepsi, at least to its producers. Through this kind of lazy appropriation, Krome—and every other company that sees ideology as merch—cheapens the protest language for everyone who actually believes in the cause. It’s a parasitical relationship: The brands degrade the space they inhabit. When the trend passes, they’ll find some other message to hijack, but the real problems their customers face will remain.

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